1. Field of The Invention
This invention relates, in general, to medical-surgical supplies for hospitals, and more particularly, to rigid, disposable containers for used medical-surgical materials, including "sharps", e.g., hypodermic needles, suture needles and scalpel blades.
2. Summary of The Prior Art
This decade has seen an acceleration of the trend in the medical-care-provision field of disposable, one-use medical-surgical devices and materials. This trend is away from the former procedure of sterilization and re-use of these devices, both to reduce the high labor costs involved in the sterilization and to insure that materials and devices used are completely sterile. Cost tradeoffs have shown this use-and-dispose philosophy compares quite favorably with the previous method.
Present hospital protocol in those institutions employing the use-and-dispose philosophy entails the assembly and distribution by unskilled personnel of a clean, but not sterilized, flexible plastic or paper container to those locations where containment is required, viz., operating rooms, nurses' stations, soiled linen rooms, and emergency rooms or so-called "med/surg" rooms, i.e., those where simple, out-patient surgery is performed.
Thus, it is not intended that these containers be used in the "sterile field" of the operating room, for example, but rather on the "back table" of the operating room, well outside of the sterile field, where the "sterile nurse" passes the used materials to be disposed of to the "circulating nurse", who then disposes of the materials in the container.
After the containers are filled, they are typically collected by unskilled housekeeping personnel and taken for disposal. In some states, this involves processing of the used materials by incineration, and in some states, by law, the materials are "red-bagged" or boxed, and stored for pick-up by contract disposal personnel. They, in turn, transport the materials to be disposed to another location where they are autoclaved under low-pressure steam for a predetermined time to sterilize them, then rebagged and taken to a landfill for burial.
Experience has taught that this disposal chain affords ample opportunity for unskilled personnel to be injured and/or contaminated by contact with used medical-surgical materials.
Thus, a problem created by the use-and-dispose philosophy is that of containing and disposing of the used materials, much of which includes dangerously-sharp implements referred to as "sharps" in the field, both within the hospital environment and in the disposal chain.
Another, and related problem is the safe containment until disposal of those sharps which might be put to illicit uses, e.g., hypodermic needles, were they to fall into unauthorized hands.
Yet another problem created by the disposal of medical-surgical materials is the containment of the potentially-contaminated, used materials in a controlled volume to prevent the contamination of the surrounding, sterile surfaces and materials until the contaminated materials can be disposed of.
Still yet another problem associated with the disposal philosophy is that of the need for the sterilization of the container for the used medical-surgical materials itself, which must be sterilized after use before bringing it back into contact with a relatively-clean environment.
Thus, it would be desirable to have an inexpensive, rigid, tamper-resistant container for safely holding and disposing of the used medical-surgical material, which is itself entirely disposable, in keeping with the use-and-dispose philosophy.